Agile Development West Tutorial—User Stories: Across the Seven Product Dimensions

This week we're at the Agile Development/Better Software Conference West in Las Vegas, where software professionals gather to learn the most up-to-date information, tools, and trends regarding agile, project management, people and teams, software testing and QA, software requirements, process improvement, metrics, design, and architecture.

Here are some hightlights from the sold-out tutorial "User Stories: Across The 7 Product Dimensions" with Paul Reed of EBG Consulting.

In this session, Reed covered how to create user stories using the Seven Product Dimensions which yield "just right" stories that both users and product owners can write and developers can understand. 

Structured conversations are key to convey information in an #agile team. -Paul Reed #BSCADC

— TechWell (@TechWell)

Using the example of "Tony the Traveller" attendees were divided into groups and asked to create high value critera feature sets for someone who would be using a system that would allow them to book conference travel.

Group exercise: Develop Value Criteria with Feature Sets and Capabilities 

Reed recommended using a Challenge/Response process to evaluate priorities and make value decisions. And to clearly identify user rolds as they help you focus options because different roles have different requirements.

#Agile teams are cross-discipline and need to work together to make smart decisions early in the lifecycle. -Paul Reed #BSCADC

— TechWell (@TechWell)

Once the value options were identified, it was time to prioritize and remove duplicates: 

How can you determine priority and high value?

Reed explained that different organization would have different goals and one way was to evaluate using IRACIS:

Value options: Increase revenue, avoid cost, improve service. #IRACIS #agile #bscadc

— TechWell (@TechWell) June 4, 2013